Tag Archives: pt our flourishing economy

America is… back?? If the standard is that job creation barely surpassed population growth for the last month on record, four years into the great Economic Unpleasantness, then you betcha. We’re rich again! Money! Pie! War! The economy added a smashing 163,000 nonfarm payroll jobs in July, while June’s figure was revised down to a mere 64,000. (And keep in mind that this is all seasonally adjusted, so no one actually has any goddamn clue how many jobs were created at any point.) The unemployment rate itself ticked up to 8.3%, as people returned to (or exited? keep reading!) the labor force to not find jobs. As we’ve seen throughout the last year or two, a major lag on job figures (besides “no aggregate demand whatsoever”) comes from the public sector, where everyone has been fired several times. But hey, maybe that’s the best thing that ever happened to them? Read more on Massive Economic Depression Pushed Back Another Month…

While America nervously fidgets with excitement waiting to hear all the disgusting sexytime harassment details from a new Herman Cain accuser (the press conference hasn’t happened yet, but we promise, uh, it will be gross?), let’s scan some of the crappy “other news” clogging up the Internet and see… oh, hm, what have we here? “The ranks of America’s poor are greater than previously known, reaching a new level of 49.1 million,” says a new revised census report. UGH, QUICK, BACK TO THE HERMAN CAIN TAB. Read more on Report: America Even Better At Making Its People Poor Than It Thought…

A shocking new Gallup poll proves that 81% of Americans — an all-time record — are against the American Government, while 82% are against Congress specifically. And 49% of Americans believe the U.S. Government is “an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.” But to read POLITICO, you’d think we’re just in a polarized campaign environment or whatever, and that everything will “work out in the end.” Haha, it will, but not in a way that POLITICO staffers or other Washington factotums can appreciate. Also, you need to include “Wall Street/The Fed” and “The Pentagon/Military Contractors” in the U.S. Government, as those are both the primary interests and the primary beneficiaries of the U.S. Government. When’s the next straw poll or whatever? Read more on Record 81% of Americans Hate America…

Unloved corporate failure Meg Whitman was last seen insisting that she should be governor of California because goddammit, she paid $141 million to be governor of California. And now the former eBay executive has re-appeared on the public stage, with news that she will be hired to run the ruined tech company Hewlett Packard. The rumor/announcement was greeted by a global plunge in all stocks, led by a collapse in all technology shares. Why can’t she just leave Earth alone? Aren’t things bad enough without Meg Whitman? Read more on Stocks Collapse Worldwide On News About Meg Whitman…

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke with his unenviable job of trying to save the crumbling American economy with interest rate tweaks is sort of like a firefighter standing before a Texas wildfire who gets to shoot at it with a water pistol while everyone yells at him about the size and type of his water pistol. The GOP leadership, on the other hand, is more like a different firefighter who stands a little further away and fires torpedoes into the blaze in the hopes that he will be elected winner of the smoldering remains after his colleagues have been burned alive. To that end, top Republican Senate and House leaders sent a strongly-worded letter to Bernanke Tuesday warning him to leave off his latest plan to stimulate the economy, because it has a near-zero chance of making everything slightly less terrible that still rhetorically counts for more than “doing nothing, screw everybody,” as the GOP strategic plan outlines. Read more on Republican Thugs Warn Ben Bernanke Not To Try To Fix Economy…

The “new thing” in America is being desperately poor, until an audience of Tea Party sociopaths maniacally cheers your death outside the razor-wire fence of the hospital. But some of these uppity poors are so desperate that they’ve politely begged the rich monsters of Congress to forgive their many debts. HR 365 was introduced today, because 194,000 sad people signed this petition begging for relief from their mortgages and student loans. All these needy deadbeats are probably going to be gathered in a football stadium and burned alive for the half-time entertainment at the 2012 GOP convention, but for now they have a “voice in the House,” until this is “tabled with extreme prejudice.” Read more on America’s Poor Beg Congress: ‘Please Forgive Our Debt, Sirs!’…

If the sunshine seemed a little bit brighter this morning and the air a little bit sweeter, you were surely imagining it — Obama’s new smog allowances keep the skies permanently brown and sour, despite the collapse of American manufacturing. But America is on the rise in one exciting new respect: One of every six Americans is legally poor, and more Americans are officially in poverty than ever before! The Census Bureau just released its 2010 poverty data, which says 46.2 million Americans are The Poors — that’s an all-time record and a 17-year peak in percentage terms. The Census Bureau bases its poverty threshold on family size and number of kids, so it goes from a $10,956 annual income for a sad adult living alone to $21,756 a year for a now-mythical family of four with two children. So remember, when trying to put yourself “in poverty” because you make 20K a year giving handjobs behind Union Station, that you’re well above the poverty rate if you’re supporting only yourself with that free-lance consultancy income. But if you’ve got an unemployed “common law husband” and a couple of malnourished orc children hunting rats underneath the half-collapsed trailer you call home, then you are part of the hottest new demographic in this great nation. Read more on New U.S. Achievement: More Americans In Poverty Than Ever!…

Social Security is in “trouble” because wealthy people aren’t required by the government to actually pay their share into the national program, and also because Congress has been “borrowing” billions of dollars that working people have paid into the program so that they might not have to starve or die of common illnesses once they’re chewed up and spit out by the capitalist system. But there’s another part of Social Security that’s running out of money even faster than the old age pensions, because a record number of discarded workers are now claiming disability payments and Supplemental Security Income — 3.3 million unwanted laborers will file for the last-ditch payments this year alone, and nearly 14 million currently receive the monthly stipends and early Medicare coverage. The money isn’t much, and is based on either your actual paycheck contributions or limited to an average $500 a month for SSI, but it’s “better” than the American alternative, which is pretending to rob a bank so you can get food and medical care in prison. Read more on Millions of Jobless Americans Filing For Disability To Get Food, Medicine…

HOORAY hooray hooray hooray, time for a special “endless economic doom” update: the Dow Jones did a 500-point nosedive today, and something called the “fear index” rose above 30, which is Very Bad (And Yet Seems Normal?), because that is its “biggest daily percentage move since May 2010″ according to MSNBC. What was happening in May 2010? Uh, Bono was performing at the White House, which explains that particular “fear index” spike. What is behind today’s FEAR INDEX? Eh, mostly probably just the “widespread economic uncertainty in the face of total government incompetence across the United States and Eurozone, for mysteriously believing strict austerity measures will reinforce weak economies.” Read more on Dow Jones Drunk Skydiving Without Parachute Again, Falls 500 Points…

Ronald Reagan’s illegitimate son Barack Obama just signed his Tea Party Disaster Bill, which officially makes “being poor” both Illegal and the legal status of 90% of Americans. So will Wall Street finally love Barack Obama a little bit more? No, of course not. Stocks collapsed. This is a Failed State. The value of American stocks has dropped nearly 7% in a week — that’s quite a Vote of Confidence! Meanwhile, regular Americans (the illegal Legally Poor) can add “no emergency social services” to “no jobs” and “no home equity” and “no homes” and “no money.” The 14% of Americans who approve of this destructive insanity are, of course, the Tea Party idiots. But at least Barack Obama gave a really terrible, infuriating little speech in the Rose Garden after spending the past few weeks attacking both his supporters and America in general. Read more on Obama’s Tea Party Bill Signed, Stocks Collapse…

While the Republicans try to force a default of the American Nation with such tactics as “scholarship grants are for communists,” the Democrats are engaged in an exciting game of catch-up. “Oh,” Obama might say, looking thoughtfully at his hands, “Pell Grants are communist? Well then, I offer a compromise of shutting down Medicare and turning our National Parks into private endangered-species hunting camps run by Ted Nugent. What else can we do?” Meanwhile, the U.S. Economy is rolling along — rolling down, fast. Turns out the 2008-2009 recession was far worse than economists could comprehend at the time, even though it was very clear to actual working people that we had plunged into a long and perhaps permanent downturn. And while economists are still pretending the “recovery” is something real and not just more double-your-money fun for America’s millionaires and billionaires, they’re finally admitting that once they fudge their numbers another percent, we’re actually already in a second recession. Read more on Just In Time For U.S. Default, U.S. Recession Gets Much Worse…

Because of many reasons including “the nation cannot even agree to print more money,” the United States is in danger of losing its fancy AAA credit rating from Moody’s, the investing service that decides what countries and businesses have good credit. (Moody’s failed to predict the housing collapse and current financial meltdown, so who knows why we are listening to them today.)
Read more on America About To Lose Its Fancy Credit Card…

Unemployment shot up to an official 9.2% as Barack Obama failed to magically create millions of new jobs via Twitter the other day. The real rate, depending on which real rate you like, is somewhere between 11% and 25%. So, no jobs for anyone, ever. The stock markets reacted by briefly going into freefall, but then investors realized it doesn’t much matter to them if one-tenth or even one-third of the workforce is unemployed forever, so stocks recovered most of the losses by afternoon. Twitter, meanwhile, is now valued at something like SEVEN BILLION DOLLARS, so hooray? Read more on Obama Failed To Create Jobs For All, On Twitter; Unemployment Soars…

The economic recovery continues to be a complete fiction, like the Harry Potter books but without all the fun sex magick. Unemployment is officially back to 9%, with real unemployment at 22%. Energy and food costs keep rising as jobless benefits run out and wages are stagnant for the lucky ducks who still earn a paycheck. And there’s a record number of people owing more on their houses than the houses are worth: “28.4 percent of single-family homeowners, representing a peak since Zillow began calculating the data in 2009.” Throw in all the other awful economic news from America and abroad, and you might wonder if this whole system of corrupt corporate welfare/warfare thing has, you know, collapsed forever. Read more on Nearly a Third of American Mortgages ‘Underwater’…

Despite consistent claims of low inflation during this endless Great Recession, Americans are paying dramatically more for gasoline, electricity, heat and food — everybody notices the $4 gas, but the jump in food prices to a 36-year record is harder to see because it’s spread out across your grocery bills. And now the official inflation rate is rising, up half a percent for January and .06% in February, just as millions of American households are running out of emergency unemployment benefits and many millions more are surviving on stagnant or part-time wages. With federal, state and local governments slashing services at a furious clip while taxes most harmful to the poorest people are shooting higher — check out what you’re paying in sales tax this year! — the basic cost of existing in this teetering country has gotten completely out of hand. Read more on Cost of Living Soars As Income, Assets & Government Services All Decline…

As America and the Entire Industrialized World dips into the second act of our 21st Century Greatest Depression, workers and employers are developing new skills to cope with the complete lack of money. In the Los Angeles City Attorney’s office, for example, about a hundred actual qualified lawyers have worked in the “reserve” program, meaning that they work full-time and prosecute cases and shuffle papers for 10 hours a day like any paid city attorney, minus the “pay” part. Los Angeles is one of the richest cities in the world, with 45 known billionaires and 268,000 millionaires — more millionaires than anywhere else in the nation, and America has the most millionaires of any nation on Earth. Anyway, it’s a hot new trend, having degreed professionals work full-time without any pay at all. Because there are no jobs! And the governments are all broke, because the billionaires and millionaires don’t pay any taxes. No wonder rich people love America so much, as a legal address! Read more on Hot New Trend: Working Actual Professional Jobs For Free, As ‘Interns’…

If you’ve been avoiding the Business News because maybe you don’t want to know how badly your 401k just got radiation-sodomized, let’s just bring you out of the fog and into the harsh light:
Read more on Stocks Collapse Everywhere In Reaction To World’s Ending…

President Obama unveiled his 2012 budget proposal today, and everybody who pays attention to these things said, “Eh, too much/not enough.” Even with the tax increases for the wealthy and the humble request that U.S. multinationals occasionally pay a few dollars of tax and the savage cuts to programs that help the very poorest people in America do things like pay their heating bills so they don’t freeze to death in the winter, this proposal would still find our United States with the largest deficit in post-WWII History: 11% of America’s GDP — the highest since World War II. So what, right? “Deficits don’t matter,” that’s what Dick Cheney always said. Anyway, $3.7 trillion dollars. That is a lot! Yet, a trillion dollars will be cut, over the next decade. What does any of this even mean? It means Eric Cantor does not approve, that’s what. Read more on Obama Reveals New Budget That Won’t Be Approved…

Like a lot of people in ridiculous housing markets a couple of years ago, Jeremy Fletcher of Northridge paid way too much for a house in the San Fernando Valley because that was the only way to buy a house just a couple of years ago. He’s a swimming pool contractor, so there’s a double disaster in the works: overpriced house in overheated market, borrower depends on housing-related construction business income. And then a wonderful bank does a wonderful thing:
Read more on This Mortgage Modification Story Is So Terrible Because It’s Probably Very Common…

Ha ha, this is our attempt at a “business news” headline. (We were never very useful at the business desk.) But there does seem to be some investor concern, what with everything in free fall around the world and especially in the oil-y parts. Meanwhile, in sad-sack America, big companies from Amazon to something that starts with “Z” (Ford? Microsoft?) are revealing the desperate measures they must take, constantly, to stay afloat in this pathetic un-recovery. But at least things are good over in Asia, where America’s owners live, right? Ha, no, “broad based sell offs” started last night. Uhh. Read more on Collapse of World’s Governments Fuels Investor Concern…

Have you been worried that maybe the super rich global elite has been suffering since the economic meltdown began three years ago? Well thanks for worrying, but they are doing just fine. Sure, there was a bit of turbulence in their NetJets charter over some of the poorer parts of America and the larger world — you try going from $1 billion a year to, say, $650 million! — but it’s smooth flying from here on out. It turns out that no matter how unemployed or cash strapped or stressed out all the non decamillionaires and hectomillionaires and cold straight billionaires might be today (and forever, until the invisible hand of death finally relieves them/us of the banal Sisyphean struggle of modern existence), the poors continues to help the super rich stay super rich. Read more on Hooray, the Super Rich Have Totally Recovered From the Collapse!…

Good news for the U.S. job market: The unemployment rate miraculously dropped from 9.8% to 9.4% in December, the biggest one-month drop in the official jobless rate since 1998! Coincidentally, this plunge in the number of Americans desperately seeking work coincides with more Americans dropping out of the labor force entirely, because there aren’t even enough new jobs to keep up with “natural growth” — 26-year-olds getting their GEDs and needing that Jiffy Lube job to help momma out at home, etc. — let alone provide work for the 15 million officially unemployed Americans. Of course the real official unemployment rate is 16.7%, because that number includes “discouraged workers” and people subsisting on seasonal or part-time or temporary work while still hoping for a full-time job again, someday. Read more on Unemployment Drops As Americans Abandon Pointless Search For Work…